The live-long day, from my lofty perch, I watched far down below the sights and sounds of Paris passing and buzzing round me, until the rattle of fiacres and the clatter of hoofs died away, and the arteries of life that intersected the town became dark and still as night drew on again, and, with a sigh of weariness, I threw myself on my bed, to sigh and pray, and to utter futile imprecations and maledictions on the hour I came to France. My gaoler was a kind but taciturn fellow. He had served a long apprenticeship to chains and groans, and to sighs of unavailing anguish; thus he seldom spoke; yet, when he did, it was only to drop casual hints of the horrors by which I was surrounded, but quite in a common-place way, for the man had scarcely an idea of anything beyond the precincts of the Bastille; and from him I learned that in this living tomb were state prisoners who had been committed to it on no better warrant than a lettre-de-cachet, of which letters any French noble might get a dozen from the premier any forenoon; prisoners who had not seen the blessed light of day for more than forty years; poor creatures whose crimes, if any, had long since been forgotten, even as their names were forgotten by their keepers, and as their existence was forgotten by the world; like the dead of forty years ago; and the whole record of whose mysterious disappearance from life and upper air, if record of it existed at all, might be found in some mouldy portfolio of Richelieu or his predecessors. Such were the inmates of the Bastille! One day I beheld a long train of personages on foot pass through the gate of St. Antoine. There were gentlemen guards, grooms, pages, and lacqueys. Six of the former bore a blue-silk canopy over the head of a tall and stately lady, who was also on foot, and carried in her right hand a lighted taper. As she passed along, cries of 'Vive la Reine' reached me. 'What is all this?' I inquired of my keeper, who chanced to be in my apartment. 'It is her Majesty, Madame Anne of Austria, proceeding on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Fiacre, to pray for the health of the King, who is ill, and to return thanks for her own cure.' 'Cure from what?' 'A dangerous issue of blood, which M. Richelieu affirmed to be the malice of sorcerers, and which had baffled her physicians with all their skill.' 'You believe in all this?' 'Parbleu, yes! If M. Seguier, Bishop of Meaux in 1649, and Jean, Comte de Blois, bore testimony to the wonderful cures wrought upon them by praying to St. Fiacre, why should not a poor unlettered fellow such as I?' 'True; this is unanswerable.' 'And we all know, monsieur, that M. Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, began a _novena_ of prayers to implore the divine intercession for the Queen, who was thereafter safely delivered of a boy, who may be Louis XIV. if he lives, yet is as unlike his father as I am.' 'Perhaps you resemble the Cardinal,' said I.